[RicoElectrico]

There is one, it's called the Raspberry Pi ecosystem, but due to the small volume and the target audience largely being not-my-own-money (think educational institutions), the price is quite detached from the production cost.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I think more of the issue might be the eink screens. As far as I can tell, there just aren't 5+ inch eink screens for cheap.

[GeoAtreides]

yes they are: https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm?___SI...

A 4.37inch E-Paper in 3 colors is $24, problem is need you to program yourself (they have code sample in python, for raspberry pi), and you need a raspberry pi, case, cables, etc.

Also, these cheap epaper displays are, of course, of lower quality (slower, lower resolution) than an kindle display.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

They jump up in price pretty quickly as size goes up. The cheapest 5+ inch display I found at your link was over $40, and it's about 100PPI. It's certainly not prohibitive, but certainly priced high compared to "just jailbreak a kindle" for any remotely kindle-comparable display, right? (remotely comparable in size and resolution)

[FrecklySunbeam]

I imagine the Kindle is sold as a loss leader, plus whatever economies of scale/negotiating Amazon does pushes the price down heavily vs buying a single unit from an electronics retailer

[TRiG_Ireland]

They look kind of cool, and now I'm trying to come up with a project such that I can justify buying one.

[nine_k]

Arduino-compatible devices based on ESP32 are plenty powerful enough at a fraction of the cost.

[RicoElectrico]

CPU is indeed beefy for a small wi-fi chip, but the small RAM hurts. Yeah, there's QSPI PSRAM but the bandwidth is lacking as well.